Tata Group to foray into safety wearable watch for personal protective equipment segment

The Tata group appears to be one of the conglomerates putting design into practice; The safety wearable is the first successful project ready for the market.Megha Mandavia&Baiju Kalesh | ET Bureau | April 29, 2017, 09:07 IST

At the same time, the $103-billion group's oldest business, Tata Steel, was exploring ways to reduce shop-floor injuries that hurt overall productivity and cost valuable time.

Katragadda then started developing a safety wearable watch for workers of Tata Steel. Titan, Tata Elxsi and Tata Consultancy Services were roped in for the 'design thinking.' The smartwatch, with an analogue face, can track heartbeats, temperature, movement, fall detection and ambient gases.

The group is now ready to sell these smartwatches through Tata Communications, its telecom solutions and services business. It sees industries, miners and freighting companies as potential customers initially.

"For these programmes, we are looking at potential revenue of $1 billion and a profit of $100 million is possible," Katragadda told ET.

"Right now, our partner for go-to market is Tata Communications. We are working on the pricing model. What might work in a B2B model is a monthly subscription rather than a certain price."

Personal protective equipment — glasses, watches, helmets and shoes — is a $30-billion market globally, according to Katragadda. The group technology office had to surmount many challenges and concerns by using the design thinking process, which put the Tata Steel worker at the centre of iterative and designing process."When you think about design, the usual conclusion is the latest, greatest, and coolest but design should be right for the end-user, the factory worker," said Katragadda. "One surprising aspect of the discussion was that they didn't want the face to be digital. They did not want any messaging to appear. They wanted the workers to be least distracted."

The Tata group appears to be one of the conglomerates putting design-thinking into practice. The safety wearable is the first successful project ready for the market from the technology and innovation office.

"The shift toward design thinking is beginning to happen at large organisations in India. It will play a large role as conglomerates become more consumer-facing," said Siddharth Pai, technology consultant. "But it is important to see how prevalent it is across the organisation. Right now, messaging is ahead of reality."

The Tata group CTO's office also had to win over the unions over privacy concerns because they were concerned that Tata Steel will use the watches to track their movements after work. "There was a resistance... there was a privacy angle. We explained the design can locate you only at work and not afterwards," Katragadda said. "Earlier, no one wanted it because of the `big brother' fear. But now, everyone wants it."

Katragadda is not keen to remove the watch feature from the device and make it a pure wearable to reduce costs as watches are a "matter of pride" for the workers.

The group technology office has done a pilot with crane workers at Tata Steel in the past six months.

"They now tell their wives that Tata has given me a watch to keep me safe but if you remove the watch — what will you tell the spouse?" asked Katragadda. "This is the philosophy of design thinking.

That dialogue with customers becomes part of the development itself. Three years later, there will be another iteration."

Other companies that have implemented the design thinking programme include the group's hospitality arm, Indian Hotels, for selling accommodation. It is using virtual reality videos to give a feel on the place before bookings. TCS is also using the process to develop geriatric design mobile applications for their insurance clients to push more sales for people above 40. Tata Elxsi is also using it to design the Kochi Metro Rail project.

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